


First Kiss

by MissMoe



Series: Recto/Verso [3]
Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose
Genre: Angst, First Kiss, M/M, Requited Love, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 10:02:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11552847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissMoe/pseuds/MissMoe
Summary: Taki is being deported. He experiences his first kiss.





	1. My Wolf-God

**Author's Note:**

> That first kiss shared between Taki and Klaus at Luckenwalde is such a beautiful scene. It takes place before the insanity of war, before all the misery of their later experiences in Taki's country. 
> 
> At this stage, Taki isn't the closed off, defensive, self-denying division commander he becomes later, he's a very sheltered, naive young man who's experiencing love and passion for the very first time. Ahh...to be in love for the first time! To have Klaus be the one to give him his first kiss. Lucky boy.

Legend has it that my ancestor who founded the Reizen line had been beloved by a foreign wolf-god. She had pursued this wolf-god and, even though they had been hunted and my ancestor killed, their love transcended time and is alive in my bloodline even to this day. Suguri told me about it when I was yet a child, when he took me to see No Man’s Land where my ancestors are buried. 

“Maybe that was the reason for this madness,” Suguri had mused as I sat nestled in front of him on the horse’s saddle. “Like moths at night that burn their wings in the lamplight, maybe it’s some kind of insuppressible impulse lying hidden in our blood. We don’t want to give up what we feel so strongly, and we lose sight of everything.”

 

His words come back to me now and I take it as comfort. I am so very frightened. War seems imminent and I am being deported back to my country. I am no longer just a suspicious foreign student with dubious intentions; I am the enemy. But that’s not the only thing that unsettles me. I’m sitting on my bed in the room I share with Klaus at Luckenwalde and all I can think about is how I’ll never have opportunity to see him again, except perhaps in battle, when we are fighting on opposite sides. Do I have it in me to kill him if it comes to that? No, I couldn’t do such a thing, not now, not after a year of…I can’t even put it into words. I don’t know what it is, this thing that I feel. Earlier I had made a confession of sorts, a private wish that I had uttered aloud in my own language so Klaus wouldn’t understand. I wanted to run away with him, across the sky, to another place where my gods can’t reach me. It was a wish that I knew could never be fulfilled, not in this life, not on this side of the sky. So, I guess I do know what it is that I feel. And it crushes me with sadness. 

I’m still unnerved by my meeting with the academy’s director. When he told me that Eurote had broken the 100-year treaty I wasn’t surprised, I was ashamed, as if my own country were somehow responsible for this breach of trust and honor. The alliance we have with Eurote is something my country abides, like one abides the bad behavior of distant relatives that bring shame to the family. My own grandfather, though, had entered into this cursed alliance with Eurote and now we all have to bear it. If it were up to me, I’d tell Eurote to go to hell. 

I can’t wait to get out of that room but I keep to protocol and politeness even as I’m seething with humiliation inside. “Please excuse me,” I say to the director, saving him the trouble of dismissing me like a beaten dog. As I salute stiffly and the door is closed in my face, I see that Klaus is standing outside in the hallway, as always, a constant shadow. 

“What’d they say?” he asks. 

“They’re deporting me,” I answer glumly. “At a time like this, it’s no surprise.” 

One of the professors sees me and puts in his two cents. “Hey, oriental aristocrat,” he sneers. “Are you scurrying back to your homeland? You little people are perfect for those old tanks. Go on, run back to Eurote like you did before.” 

Klaus whirls around ready to punch the living daylights out of the man but I stop him with a hand to his arm. “I’m paying for my grandfather’s mistakes. I have to bear it.” 

I tramp outside in the rain to be alone with my misery but Klaus keeps tailing me. “How long are you going to follow me?” I snap at him. 

“Until you go back to our quarters,” he says firmly. 

I turn around and glare at him. I’m so angry—not at him, at myself—but he’s there in front of me and so I direct all my fury at him instead. 

“Finally you look at me,” Klaus smirks. “I thought you might be crying again.” 

I can’t stand that he’s teasing me at a time like this. “As if I would!” I counter, but it’s no good. He can see right through me: beneath all my pride I am nothing more than a wounded child in need of comfort. 

“You were crying the first time we ever talked,” Klaus reminds me. It’s true. He had followed me to the wall surrounding the grounds where he saw me crying after that vicious hazing on my first day at Luckenwalde. He had been kind to me then; he had offered his hand in friendship. He’s kind to me now. “C’mon, Taki. They’ll call the MPs if you go wandering around here alone.” 

Then he grabs my arm and drags me to a stand of laburnum trees where we are more sheltered from the rain. He speaks nostalgically of the yellow flowers hanging in great chain-like clusters over our heads, and of the lilac-tinted flowers of my own country. He doesn’t know that those flowers are called wisteria; he only knows the potency of their fragrance and the way the petals swirl down like snow when an ocean breeze catches them. He only knows that those flowers remind him of me. His low, quiet voice lulls me and I am swept along with him when he speaks of the most beautiful dream: I should go with him to his own country, where he owns a small house with a rose garden cultivated by his sister. We would work with our own hands and live an honest, peaceful life. I can almost see it in my mind’s eye and I’m so tempted, so hungry and desperate for escape, but then the real me wakes up and slaps me across the face. I turn away from Klaus, ashamed by my own selfish, foolish yearning. 

“I have subjects to protect,” I mutter with failing conviction. “I can’t abandon my own people.” 

Klaus is a seasoned soldier and he gives me a heavy dose of reality, tells me all the things I don’t want to hear. “That peasant who delivered milk to you in the morning will come back to you in pieces in the evening. And that’ll happen _everyday_ until the war ends.” He reaches out and tilts my chin up with his hand and asks, “Can you handle that?” 

 _Can I handle that?_ His words are an accusation of weakness that ignites my pride and sets it burning through me like wildfire. How dare he question my competency! I slap his hand away and give him a piece of my mind, launch into a tirade about how I’ll stand by my people on the battlefield no matter what, even if it means I have to die in a ditch with them. I’m so riled I believe my own vaunting declarations and my eyes are prickling with indignant tears, but he only smiles at me, his face so flush with compassion I am taken aback. 

“Ah,” Klaus sighs, “such beautiful eyes. That’s why you’re my flower.” 

And I am utterly unmanned and shamed by his sweetness. What a fool I must be in his eyes! Klaus is already a war veteran and had commanded a squadron, lost comrades in battle and still managed to survive all the horrors with a semblance of good humor rather than bitterness. I know all this and yet I behave like an idiot—a spoiled, insufferable brat—I who have never been in battle, never killed a man, never done anything except live a pampered, privileged life. How can he stand me? 

We return to our shared room, the rain thrumming relentlessly on the rooftop, having walked the whole way in silence. I sit on my bed hanging my head, wishing I could stop time or at least slow it down so that I would have just that many more moments to be in Klaus’s presence. As foolish as I feel when I’m with him and as much as that makes me want to bury myself under a rock, still, I can’t bear to think about leaving…this, leaving _him_ behind. That moment keeps rushing forward even as I try to pull my mind further back. 

Klaus is just standing there watching me thoughtfully as he loosens his tie, and then he asks me, “Taki, can I sit next to you?” 

His voice is soft and soothing, so different than my own which remains strangled in my throat, so I nod my head mutely, and he comes and sits next to me on my bed, so closely that he only has to lean in ever so slightly for our shoulders to touch. I can smell his scent and feel the animal warmth of his big body and I think how nice it must be to embrace a body such as his. I think again of my ancestor, how she must have felt when she embraced her wolf-god, the sheer, shattering joy of it. My heart is beating wildly from all these things—Klaus’s scent, his nearness, the image of a ravishing god—when he stops my heart completely. 

“I want to kiss you,” Klaus whispers into my ear. 

I’m so stunned I gasp in a breath and it’s as if it’s my very first breath ever taken; my life before this moment didn’t exist, it begins _now_ with those words uttered by my very own wolf-god. I do not, cannot speak but it doesn’t matter. My silence is a wall easily breached by Klaus, who gently cups my face in his hands and presses his lips to mine. His lips are so…warm and I’m in a swoon, I can’t even feel my body beyond the touch of his lips on mine and his scent filling my nostrils telling me that I’m still alive and not dead and in heaven. Klaus! Klaus! My mind is screaming his name but nothing comes out as he draws away slightly and says, “Ah, it’s the same scent. Taki, you’re the boy that I met…” 

I know what he’s going to say, but I stop him with a finger to his lips because my heart is going to burst. He remembered me! Of course I remembered _him_. How could I forget? It’s not every day that a golden-eyed, golden-haired wolf appears in the imperial gardens. But he remembered me and I want to die of happiness. The seed of yearning he had planted in my heart that day, the seed I had carried inside me all these years… 

“You wanted it, didn’t you?” Klaus asks me, touching his forehead to mine. “This isn’t just a coincidence, is it?” 

And he kisses me again! He lays his huge hand over mine and when he turns my palm upwards so we can intertwine our fingers I feel as if nothing can come between us—not war, not my gods, not even death. 

“Taki, I’m going to make love to you,” he says. 

Fear suddenly grips me, but he lays me slowly back onto my bed and all I can do is acquiesce, I’m so weak with desire. He removes my tie, unbuttons my shirt, kisses down my neck. I’m trembling and whimpering, out of my mind with excitement and disbelief.

“Is this the first time anyone’s ever touched you?” he asks as he caresses my chest with his hands, “or kissed you?” and this time he sweeps his tongue into my mouth! His tongue dances and curls around my own and the taste of him is like a drug; one taste and I’m craving more, more, more! “…or heard you cry out?” 

But it’s Klaus’s voice that I hear, Klaus’s voice that draws me out, Klaus’s voice that opens up my heart, opens up my body. He lowers his head and swipes his tongue across my nipple and it feels so good I clamp my mouth shut because otherwise I’ll _scream_ and never stop screaming. I feel his hand reach down and unzip my trousers and then he’s touching me _there_ and a dam bursts inside me. I’m drowning in Klaus, caught like a petal in a torrent, drowning in everything he’s making me feel. I fight to keep my head above water but it’s hopeless. Why am I fighting when he’s giving me everything I’ve ever wanted but never imagined? So I reach for him with both hands and his gaze is upon me. There’s incredulity in his eyes and the strength of a thousand golden men. I reach up and cling to him, cling to the thick muscles of his back like a drowning man clings to a raft, and he’s there for me. My savior. My wolf-god.


	2. My Flower, My Holy Grail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Klaus makes his move and is rewarded for his boldness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Klaus can be a real romantic, another reason you just gotta love him. Does it matter that he can't remember what he's saying? No, not really.

I knew it was going to happen before Taki did. I was kept abreast of the situation with Eurote by my superiors at Luckenwalde and during one of my forays into town, my handler told me that the paperwork for Taki’s deportation had been processed and that my “mission” would soon end. My “mission” had taken a thoroughly unexpected turn over the course of the year and now it was going to be completely derailed…for me. 

“Bell the cat,” Hartmann had instructed me. “Befriend him. Protect him. Watch him. Learn everything you can about him and his people, their intentions, their motives.” 

That part was touch and go in the beginning, but then it got easier and easier, even though Taki never changed. _I_ changed, in ways I never anticipated. I’ve spent a year rooming with him, going to classes with him, training with him, eating with him, even cooking for him, for Christ’s sake. I’ve washed his blistered feet and nursed him when he was ill. My sister Claudia made him a gift of her rosehip preserves. He’s practically my…I’m practically his…we’re practically…nothing and everything. And now I’m on the verge of losing him forever. Taki. My little prince from the East. When I saw him from the window the day of his arrival at the military academy, I was suddenly reminded of flowers blowing in the wind. I can still remember his face, so innocent and wide-eyed, as he walked up the paved drive carrying his own suitcase, the way he happened to glance up at the building just as my gaze fell upon him. I’m sure he didn’t see me, but I sure saw him. My mind didn’t remember clearly but my heart must have, because in that moment my heart stopped. And it’ll stop again, permanently, if I let him out of my grasp.

 

The day that I’m dreading has arrived. I wait anxiously outside the door after Taki’s been called into Hartmann’s office to be given the news. I know Taki’s not going to take it well, even if he doesn’t show it by punching a wall or throwing a chair. He’s too proper for that. If it were me, I’d drive a tank over some other tanks, blow some shit up, then drive another tank into town and get drunk, then finish off the evening by blowing some more shit up while I smoke a cigar. But that’s just me and Taki’s my opposite in every way except in pride and stubbornness. In that respect he wins hands down, and I’m ready for it when the door opens and I see him saluting stiffly before he leaves the office. He’s trying so hard to swallow his humiliation and he’s rationalizing this and that when I know he’s just dying to curse us all out, the whole lot of us Western heathens. When that professor starts shoveling shit onto Taki as we walk down the hallway, I’m ready to flatten the guy, but Taki, of course, is above all that. He can be such an idiot sometimes. Why won’t he let me do my job? Aren’t I supposed to protect him? But, no, he wants to go gallivanting outside in the rain, as if the rain can wash away all that he feels and suffers. Like I said, he can be such an idiot. 

He throws a fit when I follow him, so I push back. I’m short-tempered and anxious and all I want to do is go back to our room and spend some rapidly dwindling quality time with him but he’s being so fucking difficult. I make a crack about him crying. I know it’s mean, but he’s asking for a spanking and well, it’s my job, isn’t it? If I let him wander around, sooner or later one of the MPs will find him and then he’ll really have reason to be sorry. I grab his arm and drag him under a stand of laburnums. We’re both wet, but under the thick clusters of yellow flowers I’m transported to another world, a world vaguely remembered but not forgotten, a world where I smelled such a singular fragrance and was showered with a rain of lilac petals. I had seen a boy then, delicate and beautiful, and I wonder now if it was all just a dream. How could something that exquisite have been real? Something equally exquisite is standing before me now, silent in misery. So I put into words what I’ve been thinking more and more, my wish for Taki to run away with me, back to my country, where I can keep him safe, away from danger, away from death. He mutters an unconvincing excuse about obligation and duty to his people. What about obligation to me, duty to me? It’s crazy, I know, that I even hope that he’d feel that way about me, even return a fraction of what I feel for him. 

I get bossy with him, I can’t help myself, and he fights back with an angry slap to my hand. The color is high on his cheeks and then I see his eyes glaze over with hot tears and I’m dismantled by the pride raging in his obsidian eyes, his brittle, monumental pride. He’s so lovely I want to put my arms around him and…as if he’d ever let me. He does let me walk him back to our room in the barracks. We don’t talk as we trudge through the rain—nothing new about that—but I can sense a desperation rising in him, or is it just me? He sits quietly on his bed, so small and defeated, and I know that if I don’t make my move now, the opportunity will pass by, never to be recaptured. What have I to lose? I’ll have lost everything if I don’t try. If he rejects me, well, at least I tried and can know for sure that he never wanted me. I can live with that. I can’t live with not knowing. 

The certainty of his deportation emboldens me, so I ask to sit next to him. He gives me a nod and I waste no time in planting my ass right beside him. His scent envelops me and before I know it, I’m telling him I want to kiss him. I swear the words slipped out of my mouth having bypassed my brain completely. Wolfstadt, I think, you horny bastard! But the truth is I want to devour him, my flower, I want to put him in my mouth and swallow him whole. My cock is already jumping to life in my trousers. I hope Taki doesn’t see, but even if he does, he’d never show it. He’s too fucking polite. I’ll distract him instead, yeah, distract him with that kiss I’ve been wanting for so long. I can’t believe it when he lets me kiss him. He doesn’t pull away or dislocate my jaw with a punch. No, he sits there and lets me hold his face in my hands and put my mouth on his and I must be dreaming. I start muttering nonsensical words, I don’t even know what I’m saying, something romantic I hope, something worthy of winning his love. I keep babbling and kissing him and, Jesus Christ, did I just tell him I’m going to make love to him? Wolfstadt! What in God’s name are you doing? But the devil sitting on my other shoulder is saying, Go for it! Now, just fucking go for it, you dumb fuck! Hartmann told you to treat him like a woman if you didn’t know what else to do, didn’t he? And you sure as hell don’t know what else to do! 

Oh, man! I’m six years older than him and he’s barely an adult. His body is so small and fragile and yet I can’t stop myself from violating him with my hands, my mouth. You’re so beautiful, Taki, and you smell so good, taste so good, and I’m so _hungry_ for you. This might be my last meal, I want to tell him, please understand I’m not just some ravenous asshole pervert! I love you, Taki, with my whole heart, my whole body, my whole soul! My love will make everything _right_. I kiss him, open up his shirt and caress him with my hands, caress his nipple with my tongue. His skin is so smooth and pale and hot beneath my fingers, my tongue, and he’s moaning and pushing out his breath in short gasps. I know then that he wants me and I’m floored by the realization that he doesn’t think I’m the world’s worst molester. No, he’s reaching up for me, clutching at my shirt, his slender arms barely able to encircle my torso. He’s giving himself to me and in that moment I know that I’ve found it, the scent of the flower that my grandfather had told me about when I was a child and kneeling at his bedside with my sister. 

“Klaus,” he had said, “there are people who are like flowers with a sweetness we cannot defy.” 

My grandfather had never found it, nor had his father or grandfather. But I have found it, my flower, my Holy Grail, and I will not let go.

 

 

 


End file.
